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The House of Commons, 1793-94 by Karl Anton Hickel. National Portrait Gallery, London.
Members 1790-1820
Published in 1986
There are 2,143 biographies included in this period, consisting of the Members returned to the Parliaments beginning in 1790, 1796, 1802, 1806, 1807, 1812 and 1818. Between 1790 and 1801 the House consisted of 558 Members. In 1801 the addition of 100 Irish Members made an Imperial Parliament of 658 Members.
The Members range from the towering figures of William Pitt, Charles James Fox, Edmund Burke, to the agricultural improver Wiliam Coke ('Coke of Norfolk'), the merchant and economist David Ricardo, to many Members of more modest talents and achievements, including the many unambitious, but nevertheless very important country gentlemen.
As R.G. Thorne explains in his Introductory Survey section on Members many of them were closely linked to the aristocracy (on average each Parliament in the period returned nearly 170 peers' or peeress's sons and Irish peers, the figures rising perceptibly from 1807 onwards).
Given that Britain was at war with France for most of the period covered (the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1793-1815), not to say that it had recently emerged from the American Revolutionary War of 1776-83, it is unsurprising that more than 400 Members at some stage served in the regular army, including Sir Thomas Picton, killed at Waterloo. A further 100 Members served in the Royal Navy, including famous officers such as Thomas, Lord Cochrane and Sir Edward Pellew.
Featured Members volume
Abbot was considered by contemporaries to be an upstart: he believed himself to be descended from Sir Maurice Abbot, MP for London, a brother of Archbishop Abbot. His father, an ‘uncommonly learned’ clergyman, who kept a school at Abingdon, died when he was three, and his mother, by her...
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Cavendish, a founder member of the Whig Club, was not expected to return to public affairs after his disgust at being defeated in 1784. He might have stood for York again and he had no objection to his name being used; on 18 Nov. 1787, however, he informed his friend Earl Fitzwilliam, ‘If I can I...
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Jenkinson ‘seemed born to be a statesman’: he was carefully educated for the role by his father, who aspired to it himself and who as Pitt’s president of the Board of Trade readily assumed that character, which seemed to be confirmed by his admission to the cabinet in 1791. At Oxford...
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Peel in later life recalled his father’s jocular admonition, ‘Bob, you dog, if you are not prime minister some day, I’ll disinherit you’. As a schoolboy he was shown the House of Commons by Pitt, whom his father held up to him as a model statesman, and before going up to Oxford in 1805 he...
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An impecunious younger son, Wellesley, described while at Eton as ‘not at all a book boy, and rather dull’, was destined for a military career, in which he progressed under the aegis of his eldest brother Lord Mornington. On coming of age, and while aide-de-camp to the lord lieutenant, he was...
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